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Comment by derevaunseraun | Hacker News Reader

I can imagine some people cheating not out of selfishness but just to get by. In the case of a curved class (which has its own set of ethical dilemmas), if nobody cheats then people will be OK on average. But because some people decide to cheat, it screws up the dynamic.

This isn't going to convince anyone in particular who wants to cheat, that wasn't really my intention

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what's the ethical dilemma of a grade curve? your grade reflects how well you learned.

Your grade reflects how well you learned with respect to your peers.

Getting 80% in an exam in a weak cohort of students might earn you an A, while doing so in a strong one might get you a B instead. Is this fair toward a student getting a B this year with the same score that earned somebody an A the year earlier just because they happened to enroll with different peers?

Also why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?

> why should the grade distribution of an exam be determined beforehand?

because we know beforehand that population density over repeated trials of some measure will fall in a normal distribution, especially when constructing such a test is more straightforward than 90% gets A, 80% gets B, etc

So, you are suggesting that if we have a class of 100 people, and we want to measure their height, we should just order them by length, and then the tallest one we call 2.1 meters, the one in the middle 1.8, and the smallest one 1.5, no matter how tall they actually are? Wouldn't it be better if we measure their actual size?

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